


The Dead, the Wide-Eyed and the Legless

by sovay



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alcohol, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Undead Owen Harper, mycology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:54:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26650231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovay/pseuds/sovay
Summary: For what felt like the fiftieth time that night, Owen Harper said, “It’s no use, Tosh. You can’t get a dead man drunk. Believe me, I’ve tried,” and for what he was reminding himself could not have been medically anywhere near that number, Toshiko Sato returned, “Well,Ican get drunkwithone,” and downed the shot herself.
Relationships: Owen Harper & Toshiko Sato
Comments: 15
Kudos: 25
Collections: Hold Me: A Comfort Prompfest





	The Dead, the Wide-Eyed and the Legless

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



> Written for [Hold Me: A Comfort Prompfest](https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1347813.html) for the prompt "Any/original, sometimes doing something terribly destructive and antisocial is EXACTLY the healing you need."

For what felt like the fiftieth time that night, Owen Harper said, "It's no use, Tosh. You can't get a dead man drunk. Believe me, I've tried," and for what he was reminding himself could not have been medically anywhere near that number, Toshiko Sato returned, "Well, _I_ can get drunk _with_ one," and downed the shot herself.

Even by the pathetically low standards of safety, sanity, and general _what in the sodding right then never mind_ that prevailed at Torchwood Three, they had known the case was a bad one from the start. Owen had watched the CCTV footage with the rest of the team, arms crossed behind Tosh's chair as the slim, fair-haired girl in the conservative skirt stared and swayed in the rush of the after-work crowd and the barman was just beginning the traditional _come on, love, don't take all night_ when the top of her head blew off. It was fast enough for comedy, except for the screams. The fine cloud of spores had glittered like frost in the club lights, settling much more slowly than her string-cut marionette of a body had dropped. None of them had spoken, not for a long, sick moment; Owen had caught himself glancing over to Jack as if for reassurance, actually hoping for once that the man would come out with one of his bloody infuriating infodumps from the know-it-all fifty-first century— _and that, my friends, is a Vegemite from the CORE galaxy. A little gross in their juvenile phase, but who among us wasn't? Other than Captain Jack What Acne Harkness . . ._ Instead, the next half-hour found Gwen talking tersely with Andy on the other side of the police tape and Tosh cross-referencing the biochemical signatures of the room with some kind of data bank of alien germ warfare and Owen kneeling over a body that seemed as much leaf-litter and hyphae as cooling flesh and blood while words like _huldra_ and _Cordyceps_ were thrown over his head as if they meant anything other than a night in the serious shit. Even the part of him that was scientifically riveted by the logistics of a corpse turned feral art installation could not miss the controlled tension in Gwen's voice as she slipped behind him to ask, _This isn't going to be like the fairies, is it, Jack?_ or the grim little flair with which that eternally inexplicable American accent had replied, _Not a chance. Fairies aren't contagious._ Back at the Hub, Jack had divided up the team with some of the old non-negotiable brusqueness that sounded like arrogance and meant anxiety, himself and Gwen to interview the parents of the deceased, Tosh and Ianto to track the spore-fall and its vectors, and Owen to glean as much as possible of what they were facing from the remains of Morfydd Jones, until earlier that evening a twenty-three-year-old bank teller with as exactly as boring a life as that sounded. Personally Owen thought it would have made just a bit more fucking sense to assign the contact tracing to the one member of the team no self-respecting microbe would bother to infect, but there was no arguing with Jack when he said things like, _Didn't you say you were still a doctor?_ and so he had been left in the white-tiled well of the morgue to discover just how ordinary a woman could look from the outside when her bones had turned as fibrous as roots and her veins as sticky as mycelium and her muscles took the imprint of his fingers with a slow-denting sponginess that even Owen's death-munged proprioception recognized as just plain wrong. He had fired off his findings to Tosh's PDA, tidied up some of the general crap around the Hub in the way he was almost certainly deluding himself that Ianto had not yet noticed, observed the point in the night at which he would have ordered himself a pizza if he could have done anything with it beyond interior decoration. If he could have dozed, he would have done that, too. He had been tiredly paging through one of Jack's godawful pulp sci-fi novels when the others returned, all of them with the bruised, compressed look of a job painfully done. _It's taken care of,_ Jack had said, so shortly that he knew it was none of his immediate business why Gwen's face was tear-blotched behind the dark wings of her hair, where the smears of foxfire all down the front of Ianto's suit and Tosh's jacket had come from; he had done his doctor's work of checking them all for internal injuries or interstellar ringworm and then gone home himself, to watch the sun finish rising over the harbor. The next day had been so blessedly, bizarrely uneventful, without even a Rift spike or a broody Myfanwy to alleviate the busywork, it had made as much sense as anything when Tosh abruptly pulled her jacket off the back of her chair—brown leather instead of yesterday's black, less sharply cut and scuffed around the buckles as if pulled out of retirement for the occasion—and declared, as matter-of-factly as if it had been agreed between them weeks ago, _You're taking me to the pub tonight, Owen._ Only a blameless, equally bemused shrug from Jack had confirmed that he was not starting to hallucinate from lack of sleep or sensory deprivation after all.

It was not that he had ever believed that Tosh was some kind of teetotaler. Repressed, yes, socially clueless, picture in the dictionary, emotionally school-leaving age, he was one to talk, but no one lasted more than a few weeks at any Torchwood facility unless they had some kind of safety valve and whatever else she had done in her spare time which he had been too self-centered to wonder about for years, Owen had seen their resident hacker queen put away her share of cheap beer, passable plonk, and girly drinks with tiny red straws in. What he had not seen before was Tosh drinking as steadily and concentratedly as if she were trying to make herself sick, ordering all her whisky sours or vodka gimlets or G&Ts in pairs and then drinking Owen's for him, like some kind of ritual for the dead—the proper dead, the kind that turned into ancestors and dropped by for tea at ghost festivals instead of fidgeting awkwardly on the other side of a slippery vinyl booth, surrounded by all the tipsy, horny, inhibition-free reminders of everything they had lost. That bloke in the black jeans, leaning back with his elbows on the bar as the girl beside him shook her tightly coiled hair and laughed, a month ago that might have been him. Or the tosser in the corner in a T-shirt for a band Owen had never liked, staring into his pint like it was telling him that if he ended the night anywhere but out on his arse for pulling the wrong bird or picking the wrong fight, it would be nobody's fault but his own. But no, because his brilliant workmate had all but scruffed him by the collar on her way to the lift, Cardiff's own walking, talking dead man was stuck witnessing something that felt like a cross between the world's saddest hen night and his own sadder wake, and he realized he was covering his stitched and splinted hand with his whole one as if anyone besides Tosh could know what the bandages meant. For a terrible moment, as she opened her mouth, he thought she was about to mention it.

She said instead, quite reasonably for the fact that it was a complete non sequitur, "Jack told you about it?"

He was suddenly, idiotically grateful for his cold skin's inability to flush. "Yeah, yeah, the highlights, yeah," with Ianto in his crisp pink shirt and pinstripes standing at his lover's shoulder like a bodyguard, the seamlessness of his buttoned-down butler act just confirming the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad nature of the previous night's work. "Alien symbiont turned human parasite, like mycorrhizae gone wrong. Pilots its host around fast-zombie-style until it finds a nice accommodating environment to disperse its spores in, such as happy hour at the Square. Fortunately susceptible to some of the UV wavelengths that don't give you skin cancer straight off—could have saved us all the trouble if that club had just gone in for black lights—so you lot ran all around town irradiating the regulars _and_ retconning them, somebody's going to wonder why a bash at the tanning salon seemed like such a good idea at the time." Trying to keep it light, he could tell he was failing from the way Tosh's fingers were worrying one of the stupid little napkins from the last round of drinks, her head bent away from him until all he could see was the silk-straight swing of her hair, the half-rims of her glasses glinting in the bar's hanging lights. He said flatly, "It sounded utterly shit, if you ask me," and watched the napkin come apart instead of her face.

"Toshiko Sato." Her voice was bitter as hangover, tearlessly dry. She had marvelous diction for the weight of alcohol behind it. "Clever, clever Tosh. Maths wizard, computer genius. The woman who can build machines that should never have worked. Do you know what she can't do, Owen? Tell a terrified kid who just wanted a night on the town with his mates that it's going to be all right, not when all of her readings say he's more than fifty percent fungi from Yuggoth and that's why he's saying _flip the net far_ when he means _who are you_ and starting to walk toward us when all he wants to do is run away. It was fast-moving, Owen. We couldn't find them all in time. We just had to . . . find them. There weren't too many casualties, not for Torchwood. Nothing that clever Tosh can't cover up with her faked CCTV and her fiddled chat logs and all the rest of this—this _fucking_ job!" She groped across the table for the last mixed drink standing and slammed it back so hard he could hear the ice cubes rattle against her teeth. In something of the same small, clear, tumbling way, Owen thought that any job that could drive Tosh to drunken swearing was a fucking job indeed.

He got an encore almost immediately, as she tried to order another round from a passing server and he tried to countermand it and she called him bloody high-handed—"Yes, love, and cold as they come, but remember what that means? Can't give you CPR if you cop it from—Christ, tell me a couple of those went down your sleeve, _I'd_ be off my face and I can't even metabolize," running his mouth to distract her while the doctor in him assessed the likelihood of real danger and the friend remembered needing exactly this mindless self-punishment, nights on the tiles or wrestling in strangers' beds, anything to blunt the aching grief of being Owen Harper.

The thought stopped him mid-patter, easy for a man who only breathed to speak. Maybe his emotions were just echoes, decaying loops of habit in a body whose adrenal glands had packed it in with the rest of his autonomic nervous system, but then the echo of anger felt as strong as the real thing, hot and stomach-twisting as shame: Tosh who had left his flat quietly after he ruined his own hand to hurt her, Tosh who had sent her shell-shocked soldier to save the future and die, when she needed to break down messily, had he been her model? Nothing to begrudge her if so, he had bloody well hung it out for all to see, his one-night stands and his hangovers, his self-abrading cynicism and his reckless pettiness, the colossal wanker who shoved all his friends out to arm's length until all of a sudden he needed them to keep him human, more human than he sometimes thought he had been when he was alive and doing his best not to be, one more shard of hopeless debris in the drag of the Rift. Bloody Torchwood, chewing up the human sense of wonder and spitting it out since the days of Empire. Making a gutter of the stars. Except that he had seen for himself that sometimes even the stars held out a hand in the dark and when a stranger reached out to take it, it sang like the depths of the sea; he had been that beacon himself, that reminder of not being alone. His mouth curled ruefully. He had gotten it arse about face, just like a colossal wanker would. When Tosh needed to be fucked-up and vulnerable, he was the person she had decided was allowed to see.

He turned to pry her off the poor sod of a server and saw her about to be amazingly sick.

If he was honest with himself, which increasingly there seemed no reason for him not to be, Owen had always wondered what Tosh's flat looked like. Some part of him had apparently been convinced it was full of arcane electronics, DIY particle accelerators or oscilloscopes from the eighth dimension, like an extension of her workstation at the Hub with its heaps of colored wires and blinkenlights. Finding out that it was clean-lined and airy, with the normal amount of toaster ovens on the kitchen counters and discarded clothes at the foot of the double bed, was not so much disillusioning as endearing, all the more so since his own place these days resembled the dodgier kind of real estate photography, depressingly vacant of evidence of habitation or personality. He did think he would have appreciated it more if his first sight had not been with a sweaty, sweary, still somewhat seasick Tosh draped over his shoulders, but whatever kind of idiot, or bastard, or sweetheart—she had called him all of the above in the process of booking it out of the pub, another dead loss for the Torchwood staff night out—he was, he had been quite clear that it was not the kind who left a friend to pour herself out of her own taxi, especially when she had needed to be more or less lugged into it the first place. No doubt Jack would have swept her up against his chest like the eternal hero he resembled even when he left his drama greatcoat at home, even Ianto who was smuggling some lovely shoulders under his prim tailoring could have made a better fist of it. Owen, in death as in life a skinny little sod with a face like a wet cat and less in the way of weight than many women he had slept with, just felt thankful not to have added a concussion to the list of problems her head was going to have in the morning.

"Oi, love," he said softly. "We're home."

She was nothing like sober, looking up at him from the dark-patterned duvet where he had laid her with as much care as she would let him, but she was focusing on him now, her sable-black eyes dilated normally for the low light, her mouth faintly curving under the damp threads of her hair. A man who was alive and just about equally ratted might have bent to kiss her, never minding that he had held her hair as she puked in the street; might even not have been a complete twat about it the morning after, defying the terror of loss that leapt at his throat and choked him every time he thought about how precious all of these stupid, fragile, irreplaceable people had become to him. A dead man settled himself on the bed beside her and gently stroked the hair he could barely feel through his numbed surgeon's fingertips.

"Advice from the medical officer, all right? You're going to need to drink more water than seems physiologically possible and if you can get some crisps into you for the salt, you're not going to want to, but you should. Personally, I think the thing about ginger and lemon is a load of earthy-crunchy bollocks, but to repeat, hydration is your friend, unlike all of that fancy booze you wasted on my trainers. If it gets really hideous, come talk to me about my stash of alien dope, which hasn't been touched since Ianto got himself bitten by that adorable little Pirxian, you know, with the pyrite for teeth. The technical term for how you are going to feel when you wake up is shit."

Tosh's mouth flickered a little. "I _have_ had a hangover before, Owen."

"Oh, yeah? Professionally?" That made her laugh, even if she winced with it; he was glad to see her roll onto her side, curled so closely that she could have butted her forehead against his knee, like a cat. The soft leather of her jacket still belted around her waist made her look far more stylish than he suspected he ever had in similar positions. He had helped her off with her boots at the door. More quietly, he went on, "I don't know that I'd have hit the bars first thing after what I saw on that surveillance. One minute, game of darts with the boyos, next minute, mushroom planet. And you got a closer look than I did. You really needed to shut your brain down that badly, you could have just got blind at home like the rest of us sad weird gits." Eliding the fact that nothing shut him down anymore, just wore him out until he could literally stare at the walls in what passed for a dead brain's downtime; she knew and he knew it and it did not matter so long as it drew another smile, so long as she understood that whoever she had or had not saved this time, she was still Toshiko Sato, bloody brilliant genius and brave as fuck. He might even try reminding her when she was sober. People seemed to accept that sort of thing from him more often now that he was dead. "What I'm saying is, I don't know what that was, but you let me share it with you. And except for the part where we still have to come in to work tomorrow, it was . . ."

He knew, he knew like it had been written out for him in an instruction manual, dead idiots, for the use of, the next word was supposed to be something like _nice_ or _special_ or _an honor_ , but even when he was a live idiot his mouth had never been good at taking memos from his brain and without the excuse of a molecule of alcohol in the dry bed of his bloodstream, Owen heard himself saying with actual horror, "That wasn't our date, was it?"

But it was worth it, because Tosh was laughing and he could laugh, too, whether or not he needed to breathe, and even when she came through the huge rolling cog of the door the next morning looking like a sidewalk artist's bad sketch of herself, it was a sketch of his perfectly warped workmate, not her bitter, receding ghost, and even before she took her coffee from Ianto's hands like it was a personal favor from God, she met his eyes and smiled, a little wanly, but enough. Bloody Torchwood, and he could not imagine it without her. The last thing she had said before she fell asleep against his knee had been, "Come on, Owen. If it'd been our date, I'd have wrecked you at pool."

**Author's Note:**

> I may have failed the antisocial part of this prompt. Title courtesy of the [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieN2C5_B_1U) by Laura Veirs, which I do not otherwise much associate with these characters.


End file.
